Traditional furniture designs have typically utilized wood or metal frames to provide stability and rigidity to the shape of the furniture, namely the seat the back end the arm and sufficient structure to support the weight of a user. This traditional approach to furniture design has resulted in durable but generally heavy furniture that is difficult to move and to combine with other furniture to provide versatility in seating arrangements. More specifically seating that Includes upholstery is typically assembled by hand and typically starts with a core made out of plywood boxes so as to create and provide sufficient structure to support the attachment of the upholster cushions and the weight or the user. This type of assembly requires a great deal of manual labour, not only to make the core box, but also to achieve the desired upholstered finish. The upholstery is typically tacked onto the plywood boxes using staples or nails and does not allow for the ability to remove the upholstery.
Modular furniture systems are well known in the art and they have typically had a light weight construction and utilized a foam polyurethane core with a fabric cover to the reduce weight of the overall structure. While this construction helps reduce the weight of the furniture and makes it easier to move, it does not provide the required structure and rigidity to the furniture to support a person of average weight that is typically derived from wood or metal. As a result these foamed structures typically break down or degrade over a short period of time and provide insufficient support for the user.
Traditional modular furniture systems have also tried to include into one system a variety of seating structures, like individual seating, lounge seating, tables, and shelves for example. The versatility, lightweight aspects, and uniform assembly make modular furniture a popular choice to provide a variety of seating configurations and options to the end user. However to achieve these different configurations or options, existing modular furniture systems often require a different unit design for each aspect of the modular furniture system or different piece of furniture. Therefore each unit design must be individually fabricated to create the final piece of furniture, whether it is a seating unit, table or a seating lounge. As a result each mechanical fabrication of each unit design requires specific positioning, mechanical fastening, and the use of cumbersome tools. As such each unit design is not interchangeable, nor adaptable to form a different piece of furniture.
The present invention describes a modular furniture system that provides sufficient and equivalent support to a user as wood or steel, while being light weight, moveable and providing flexibility on the orientation and combination of different types of seating arrangements.